This chapter provides a critical examination of the promise of AI technology with a focus on museums and cultural heritage organisations. We argue that while AI shows great potential for digitalisation, collections management and curation, its implementation is a complex endeavour. First, we discuss artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies with great potential such as computer vision and natural language processing, as well as the implementation of AI for heritage encounters. We then identify a number of challenges in implementing these technologies—namely using technology to address the diversity of human memory and culture that is inherent in cultural heritage collections, but also issues of accessibility and technical know-how. Finally, we envision the future potential of AI for the digitalisation of heritage.
Interviewing is one of the most common techniques used to conduct qualitative research in the social sciences and humanities. As a result of globalization, researchers increasingly conduct interviews cross-, inter-and intra-nationally. This raises important questions about how differences and sameness are understood and negotiated within the interview situation, as well as the power structures at play within qualitative research, and the role that reflexivity plays in mediating these. What does it mean to interview Black women as a Black woman? How is ethnicity negotiated across various qualitative research encounters? How are differences bridged or asserted in feminist interviewing? These are just some of the questions explored in the chapters in this volume. Drawing on their recent research, the contributors detail their experiences of engaging in qualitative interviewing and examine how they negotiated the various dilemmas they encountered. The contributions challenge some of the assumptions made in early feminist work on interviewing, providing nuanced accounts of actual research experiences. This volume explores the practice and implications of conducting cross-, inter-and intra-cultural interviewing, bringing together researchers from a range of disciplines and countries to describe and analyse both its vicissitudes and its advantages.
With the expansion of the EU in 2004 and its inclusion now of 25 European countries, the movement of workers across the Continent will affect the employment opportunities of women. But as this up-to-date investigation across nine countries shows, there remain significant differences amongst specific European countries regarding women's education and employment opportunities. Taking 1945 as its historical starting point, this sociological study, based on some 900 questionnaire responses and more than 300 in-depth interviews, explores the complex inter-relationship between women's employment, the institutionalization of equal opportunities, and Women's Studies training. This volume is the first to explore what happens to women who have undertaken Women's Studies training in the labour market. Factors influencing their actual employment experiences include employment opportunities for women in each country, their expectations of the labour market and gender norms informing those expectations, how far equal opportunities are actually enforced and the strength of local women's movements. Doing Women's Studies provides unique information about, and insightful analyses of, the changing patterns of women's employment in Europe; equal opportunities in a cross-European perspective; educational migration; gender, race, ethnicity and nationality; and the uneven prevalence and impact of Women's Studies on the lifestyles and everyday practices of those women who have experienced it. The contributors are prominent feminist researchers from nine European countries. Their findings will be of interest to sociologists and gender studies experts working in the areas of gender, employment, equal opportunities and the impact of education on employment.
This article centres on a figure generated by war and conflict, that of the refugee, in a contemporary novel, Henning Mankell’s The Shadow Girls, first translated into English in 2012. It explores the use of a specific narratological device, embedded narrative, as a strategy to “give voice” to refugee girls. Mankell’s novel is of particular salience for contemporary conflict-related migration into Europe as it explores the dilemma of how to respond to the refugee crisis in an ethical manner. As such it constitutes an imaginative and narratologically complex intervention in the construction of refugee narratives. In this article I draw on the narratological theories of Gérard Genette and Mieke Bal, and the theoretical writings of Arjun Appadurai (2006, 2009), Paul Ricoeur (1990) and Emmanuel Levinas (1961, 1972). It argues that in The Shadow Girls Mankell critiques notions of “giving voice” as adequate to the plight of refugees through his use of particular narrative devices.
Feminist activism is often taught as an historical phenomenon, and many students entering courses on women's studies are not familiar with current feminist work in the field. This book documents a wide variety of different forms of feminist activism in the 1990s, from organisations such as "Rights for Women" and "Southall Black Sisters" to "Asian Women's Work in Refuges". It raises questions about the meaning of feminist activism and its interpretation within women's studies and other academic disciplines. The chapters suggest, against much current representation within women's studies and elsewhere, that feminism is still alive.; With a comprehensive introduction providing an historical overview of the development of feminist activism from second wave feminism onwards, this text is intended to be of use as a resource for all students of women's studies and related courses.
This article explores why innovation, conventionally associated with the masculine (e.g., Andersson et al., 2012; Lindberg, 2012), might also be framed as feminine, indeed on occasion feminist. It does so via an exploration of the embedding of a new academic discipline, in this instance Digital Humanities, in existing higher education institutions in the Nordic countries. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in 2017-18 with Digital Humanities practitioners in Finland, Sweden and Norway, this article argues that the feminisation of innovation in higher education institutions can lead to the material and symbolic marginalisation of those disciplines, with specific consequences both for their practitioners and for those disciplines. As part of this, the article analyses how innovation can be considered both desirable and disruptive (innovation as such constitutes a disruptive technology), and utilises Fiona Mackay’s (2014) notions of ‘embedded newness’ and the ‘liability of newness’ to explore the gendered implications of the feminising of innovation.
The Nordic countries are regarded as frontrunners in promoting equality, yet women’s experiences on the ground are in many ways at odds with this rhetoric.
Putting the spotlight on the lived experiences of women working in tech-driven research and innovation areas in the Nordic countries, this volume explores why, despite numerous programmes, women continue to constitute a minority in these sectors.
The contributors flesh out the differences and similarities across different Nordic countries and explore how the shifts in labour market conditions have impacted on women in Research and Innovation.
This is an invaluable contribution to global debates around the mechanisms that maintain gendered structures in Research and Innovation, from academia to biotechnology and IT.
Digital Humanities (DH) has emerged as a new academic employment field in the past 20 years or so. Its place within the academy remains contested, differently realized and materialized in different socio-cultural contexts. It conjoins domains conventionally female-dominated (Humanities disciplines) with technology domains that have been regarded as male-dominated. Yet while there has been much research on women within technology-driven work environments in general, there has been no research on DH as an emerging employment context, or on the impacts of gender in its formation both as workplace and as a site for professional identities. This article draws on qualitative research conducted in 2017/18. It examines how gender, DH as a materialized workplace, and professional identities within it, are imbricated in a field characterized by ‘intersectionalized identities’. These ‘intersectionalized identities’ have particular effects, producing ‘vacated spaces’ as metaphorical and as material gaps.
Purpose - In "Can the subaltern speak?," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes the important distinction between representation as "Vertretung" and "Darstellung." She also produces a strong version of whom she regards as a subaltern woman. Thirty years on both the distinction between "Vertretung" and "Darstellung" and the question of who the subaltern woman is, remain extremely important, not least in methodological considerations in cross-cultural contexts. A number of questions may be asked in relation to representation, such as: how distinct are its two meanings in the interviewing context? And how do they relate to the notion of the co-production of knowledge which has gained such traction in the past three decades? The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, I draw on cross-cultural interviewing experiences. Starting from the silence of illiterate rural women in a study conducted in Madhya Pradesh, India, in 2011 (Mohanraj), this paper draws on the research experiences of the author and a number of projects reported on in Cross-Cultural Interviewing (Griffin, 2016) to elucidate how one might re-think both representation and subalternality in the contemporary globalized context.
Findings - The experiences of cross-cultural interviewing I draw on in this paper show that in the contemporary context subalternality may be more productively understood in terms of a continuum rather than as the radical state of unreachable, unspeaking alterity that Spivak proposes.
Originality/value - The paper contributes new perspectives on Spivak's notion of the unspeaking alterity of the subaltern in light of globalized developments over the past 30 years and specific experiences of cross-cultural interviewing, as these comment on Spivak's insights.
The rise of new family formations as lived experience,not least as a function of developments in reproductive technologies, has been accompanied by a range of cultural productions —auto/ biography, poetry, films, plays, novels— centring on the question of the impact of these technologies on the individuals concerned. Focussing on one such production, the hitherto little explored text of the play A Number by one of Britain’s most preeminent feminist playwrights, Caryl Churchill, whose work is also much performed in the us, this article examines how the play intervenes in debates about new reproductive technologies. I draw on theoretical writings on reproductive technologies, as well as first-person accounts of donor insemination, to argue that in her exploration of father-son relationships in an all-male setting, Churchill produces a highly innovative and complex engagement with issues of reproduction and paternity, refusing conventional notions of the heteronormative nuclear family, of the effects of non-normative reproduction, and of the predictability of the effects of divergent (pro)creation.
In the twenty-first century when mothers are frequently styled as their daughter’s ‘best friend’ and confidante, feminist writings on motherhood continue to construct mother–daughter relations as problematic. Deborah Levy, a contemporary writer with an experimental bend, mobilizes Hélène Cixous’ famous essay ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ (Signs 1(4):875–893, 1976), and in particular the line, ‘It’s up to you to break the old circuits’ to explore embodiment, female rage, abandonment and co-dependence in her most recent work, Hot milk (Penguin, London, 2016). This chapter explores the conditions of maternality in the twenty-first century as a replay of ‘the drama of the gifted child’ (Miller, The drama of the gifted child. Faber and Faber, London, 1979) which requires ‘morphing together’ as an antidote to female victimhood.